External Hard Drive Ex-Fat Issue

Hi all

I have two identical external hard drives (Transcend).

They are both set to Ex-Fat as I have a mixture of Windows and Apple Computers.

They are about 3 months old. They were formatted on an Apple IMAC to Ex-Fat.

They worked away fine as I backed up the lap top on it.

Now when I plug in the External Hard Drive the light flashes but it doesn't show up to be accessed.

I can stop the fsck process and the it comes up with error messages and that its read only and can't be repaired. It's not mounted and it can't be mounted

As far as I can see the disks themselves are fine. They read/write on Windows without issue.

In general its seems daft to me that with an Apple in 2021 you can't just plug in an out harddrives without ejecting them first. If you have power cut or other issues you can end up with an external hard drive that doesn't work properly.

I've searched for answers but there seems to be some extremely complex and over technical proposed solutions which don't seem to fix the problem at all. It also seems to be a common enough problem.

Is there any simple suggestions.

I've seen some suggestions like leave it plugged in and flashing and eventually maybe 30 mins later it might function properly.

Resetting VRAM is another and running scripts

None of them seem to actually work for people

Most questions seem to have hundreds of people with the same issue but no easy solution.

You buy into Apple because you expect it to work like their phones or IPADS.

After a number of years with an IMAC I'd have to say its underwhelming and makes Windows look pretty reasonable